


lovebird

by mythstake



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-07-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:47:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25569256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mythstake/pseuds/mythstake
Summary: New Asgard is kingless, and Thor Odinson wants to know why.
Relationships: Brunnhilde | Valkyrie/Loki (Marvel), Loki & Thor (Marvel)
Comments: 5
Kudos: 38





	lovebird

Thor had been back for a day before he’d wandered to the lone outcropped house on the seashore.

News was slow to spread in the expanses of space, but it was quick to bring the god back home. ‘Home’ being an odd word to throw about again, like one’s tongue when you're reminded that it sits uncomfortably in your mouth, but he came all the same.

One of the Guardians— the bug girl, Mantis, came to him with a message sent from Earth about seven months ago. It was simple enough;

‘New Asgard is kingless.’

The mortals had been kind enough to give him a lift back, but prying the truth out of the Asgardians who had just begun to settle into their new kingdom of fish guts and freezing cold had been another matter entirely.

_‘Such a shame,’_ they would sigh as they went about their business.

_‘What is?’_ he would probe, noting the flashes of fear that would pass their eyes at his insistence. His brother hasn't lost his touch with their citizens, he reasoned. 

_‘You hadn't heard, your Majesty?’_ they all paused in suspicion and curiosity. How could he have?

Then, little by little with a piece of gossip here and a rumor there, he began to put the mystery together.

New Asgard had lost their king, but their king had lost much, much more.

Thor rapped a knuckle harder than he’d have liked against the large door of a proportionally larger house sat just a stone’s throw away from a pebbly beach characteristic of their gracious host, Norway.

Nothing stirred for quite some time after, and the large man shifted from foot to foot awkwardly as he waited.

Thor raised his hand again to knock again, louder this time, as the blue door swung open to reveal the younger prince. He looked taken aback. He looked like he hadn't slept in weeks.

“Brother?” Loki admonished. He did not open the door wider, nor did he gesture him inside. But it remained open all the same.

“Don't look so surprised. I do have to keep an eye on you, you know. It’s part—”

“Part of the treaty, I know.” Loki interrupted coolly. “I just didn't know you would have taken it so literally.”

Thor rubbed at his eyepatch unconsciously with a rumbled laugh. A quip, that was good. Very much like the brother he had left.

“Are you going to let me inside, or am I going to have to barge my way in?” As blunt as always and so very persistent, it became abundantly clear he wasn't going anywhere.

Loki looked thinner than usual in the wide doorway, more gaunt in the baggy pajamas he wore that said much about just how often he was seeing company. He sighed, the door swung, and he stepped back as Thor walked over the threshold into the darkened interior.

The curtains had been drawn and he blinked hard once, twice to adjust from the bright daylight.

In the living room black, modern furniture sprawled in what he could only assume was a tasteful arrangement. Meticulously clean and kept, like the man ghosting to his side then away into the kitchen.

Loki hadn't said a word since he stepped inside.

“Where’s Valkyrie?” he called loudly before a crash came from the other room followed closely by a hissed curse. Thor peeked around the corner just in time to watch his brother stuff a fingertip into his mouth while he wiped the rest of the shards of a broken glass with a dish towel into a trash bin.

So he tried again. Gentler. “Care to tell me why the King of New Asgard has abandoned her post?” Not gentler. Instincts bad.

The look Loki gave him would have killed, if it could. All wrath and panic, like a cornered animal. He took his finger from his lips, pressing a thumb hard into the small cut. Thor watched and Loki answered.

His brother’s face straightened again. “She's taken a leave of absence.” It sounded official. Sterile. He immediately distrusted it.

“That doesn't sound like the Valkyrie I know.” he countered, moving to rest a hip against the doorway with his arms folded against his chest.

“You'll have to take that up with her.” Loki said dully while he fished another mug from the cupboard overhead. It was like watching one of Stark’s automatons go through the process of making tea. One step performed perfectly after the other. He’d had practice.

“Brother, tell me wh—”

“She’s in New York, so I suggest you start there.”

“New York?” he asked confusedly. No one had mentioned New York. If she was there, why was Loki here? Thor hadn't seen much of their blooming relationship, but he’d seen his brother leaving her chambers about as often as he’d seen him going in.

“Oh yes. Your companions were very forthcoming in offering her a place to stay.” The bitterness in his brother’s voice couldn't have been hidden. He had a sneaking suspicion that Loki hadn't even made an attempt to do so. Strange for a man who masked every aspect of himself so closely.

“So—”

“I think you should go.” Loki interrupted him for the third time that day, taking his mug with him as he slipped past back into the sitting room.

“I'm not—  _ hey!  _ I'm not going anywhere. Just what the Hel happened between you two? I leave and— Loki,  _ I am talking to you _ .”

“You already know damn well what happened.” Loki snapped back, nearly shattering another cup of tea in a slam against the coffee table. Liquid sloshed over the rim and onto the glass. “You asked the whole of Asgard, did you not?”

Thor sighed, looking down in shame. Caught red-handed. Loki hadn't yet gotten used to the look of it on his face.

“... Why didn't you just tell me?”

His brother slumped down into an expensive couch heavily, clearly too exhausted to maintain graceful airs.

“And tell you what, Thor? That I've made another mess and I need my  _ gracious  _ big brother to clean it up for me?” The godling tilted his neck against the metal backing of the sofa and stared at him from that angle. Thor didn't know how to respond.

“I could have been there for you. For her. Loki, I'm sorr—”

“Don't. Don't you dare pity me or I'll run you through myself.” he hissed, looking disgusted as he raised his head again. Whether it was with his so-called pity or himself, Thor couldn't say.

So Thor nodded and conceded ground he hadn't known he was lording over, stepping carefully over to take a seat at the other side of the table. He took the brewing cup of amber tea to take a sip. Loki knew he hated it. The odd gesture went unmentioned.

“Why did she leave?” Thor tried again, and this time Loki stayed silent for a long moment without an interjection. He stared at the mug of tea in his brother's hand because it was easier.

“Why does any woman leave? She’d gotten bored and decided to move on.”

“Bullshit.”

Loki’s eyes flicked up to Thor's. His jaw clenched.

“She wanted something I cannot give her.”

“... Love?” Thor tried, setting the mug back onto the table. Loki made no move to take it back.

“A family.”

Thor laced his fingers in his lap. His leg jittered on the floor nervously.

“I hadn't known she was pregnant when I left.” An admittance on his part that he knew more than he let on. His brother scoffed at his honesty.

“Nor did either of us for some weeks. She wasn't even aware she was still capable after all the booze she’d soaked up over the millennias. So when she told me… —” Loki’s voice drifted off, a twitch of a smile pulled at the corner of his mouth at the memory. His voice grew soft and Thor strained to hear it. “Me, a father. Could you imagine?”

He swallowed at the rhetorical question. Answering it would be a mistake, he knew, but he  _ could _ . He so earnestly could imagine Loki with a bundle in his arms, looking wholly terrified and in awe all at once.

Thor’s eye burns with wetness and he sniffs hard to cover it.

“What happened?” He rubbed at his nose, watching condensation form on the outside of the mug. He doesn't meet the blue-eyed stare boring holes into his face.

“There were… complications. It was hardly an easy pregnancy in the beginning but we thought the worst was over. Then… the day came and…”

“... Stillborn?”

Loki didn't answer.

Thor nodded and wrung his hands.

“It happens to the best.”

“So they tell me.”

“They?” he murmured quizzically.

“The nursemaids. The healers—  _ doctors.  _ Doctors.” Loki brought a hand to his mouth and repeated the word as if to remind himself of the proper Midgardian term.

It surprised him to see his brother readily take to a planet he was so intent on destroying, but as he looked about the modern indistinguishably Midgardian room in the quiet he realized—

Loki had been trying to make a home here. He’d  _ settled _ .

It’s sobering.

“Brother,” Thor spoke again, finally meeting his brother's eyes. He’d never seen him so distant. “It isn't your fault.”

Loki stared.

“What?”

“The baby— there was nothing you could do.”

Loki’s eyes grew glossy.

“How could you know? How could you  _ possibly _ know?” There was a wavering in his voice and a tremble in the fingers he clenched into a fist to tame.

Thor wondered if anyone had told Loki this. He wondered if Loki would have listened if they had.

“Tell me something. Has there ever been a child born of an Asgardian and a Jotun?” Loki spit out the words like he’d been choking on them for a long time, and now they'd finally left his windpipe.

Thor didn't know how to answer. So he didn't. 

“What do you think would come of such a union?”

Thor raised his hands over his mouth and kept them there.

“She never had a chance.” It was resigning, those words. A finality Thor found it hard to argue against. But he looked at the withering figure of his little brother and saw the little raven-haired boy he once swore to protect and he knew he had to  _ try _ .

“Did the… the  _ doctors  _ tell you such things?”

Loki looked caught for a moment.

“Of course not. How are they to know anything about the biology of—”

"How are _ you _ to ? ” he countered with furrowed brows. Loki swallowed and reached for his tea.

“It doesn't matter either way, now.” Loki took a sip, flexing his hands around the mug. It was still warm.

“Why is that?”

His brother sucked in his cheeks like he always did when contemplating a lie.

“She wanted—” Loki licked at his bottom lip, closed his eyes, and sighed. “Brunnhilde wanted to try again.”

Thor watched his shoulders sag like some small weight had been lifted from them.

“And what did you want?” It wasn't a question asked of Loki very often. Loki very rarely ever knew, even when it was.

“I wanted Astá.” he admitted in a whisper; a secret he’d kept close to his chest.

Thor stood and Loki’s eyes opened to follow him as he sidestepped the table to sit at his side. Not too close, but just enough.

“So she left.”

“No, not then. She understood, but—”

“But?”

“... But I… couldn't—” he set aside the mug. Thor noticed the cracking in the paint. Five for each fingertip. “I couldn't **_be_** there. Not in the way she needed. She said I… _stifled_ her. That she needed time to _think_ so she— she left.”

“Ah,” Thor replied, dumbly.

Loki raised a hand in a noncommittal shrug before limply dropping it back to his lap to fidget with the other.

“You didn't try to stop her?” Thor watched his brother recede into himself as the tide did. As snails and turtles and all manners of sheltered beasts with soft bellies do.

“ What am I to say? I want her to be happy, and I can't  _ make  _ her happy. Not with who—  _ what _ I am.”

Thor raised his brows and exhaled heavily. That wasn't something he’d ever expect to hear from Loki.

“Do you love her?”

Loki’s face pinched like he was looking at a raving mad idiot.

“Are you stupid? Of course I love her. How could I not? I'd have taken her hand if this whole damned war hadn't started—”

Ah. That was what he’d been waiting for. Thor smiled for the first time that day, much to Loki’s unnerved puzzlement.

“Brother, I think you should read this.” he suggested helpfully as he dug around in a pocket.

Loki could only stare blankly. If Thor pulled out a scrap of paper with an uplifting quote on it by some mortal, he might actually kill him.

“What—” came his jilted query while Thor shoved— oh, wonderful, a scrap of paper into his hands.

With an annoyed glance, Loki read.

Loki re-read.

Then he looked at Thor for a long moment before reading it again.

‘New Asgard is kingless.

Love,

Dove’

“Dove is what you called Brunn, right?” Thor offered. Loki nodded dumbly.

“When—” His eyes were wide, even as he leaned back into the sofa with a hand at his mouth to cover the grinding of his teeth.

“Seven months ago. I'm late.”

Loki’s mouth fell open.

Thor continued, with an all-too-pleased tone, “And so are you.”

It wasn't everyday that he got to get one up on the clever sibling. Even if it took shaking him by his gaudy, expensive suits to do it.

Still, as tense and coiled as Loki looked to go, his eyes kept rereading the same line over and over again.

‘Love, Dove’

He may be in severe denial about many things, but he wasn't stupid. He left that to the professionals like Thor.

Thor put a heavy hand over Loki’s, covering the paper.

“The war’s over, brother. Go home.”

For the third time in their long, long lives, he saw a tear streak down his brother’s cheek. And, for perhaps the first time, it was joined by a smile.

Loki pushed hard at his brother’s shoulder before scooping up his half-drunk cup of tea, gesturing to the front door with a cant of his head.

“Come on, you oaf. Or did you think I was going to leave you here with the throne, unattended?”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. 💕


End file.
